Stop Me Before I Shill Again: American Journalism and the Iraq War

by William A. Dorman

In some ways the performance of the press during the most recent war with Iraq was more egregious than during 1991 conflict, if for no other reason than journalism had overwhelming evidence of where it had gone wrong the first time around in the form of a plethora of academic studies, books, insider mea culpa, professional conferences and forums and news workers should have known what to look out for. Yet on the evidence it is as if all the media’s breast beating during the post-Gulf War period about its abject failures counted for nothing as journalists enthusiastically jumped on the war wagon as it dashed for Baghdad, providing little more than “gun slit” journalism while falling all over themselves, ala Judith Miller of the New York Times, to paint the conflict with a brush provided by the Pentagon.

On the surface, of course, there were significant differences between 1991 and 2003 in terms of the conditions under which journalists found themselves operating, not the least of which was the embed system, which put newsgatherers in the middle of the action by contrast to the pools used in Grenada, Panama and the Gulf War, which kept them at a tidy distance. At the end of the day, however, the end result was pretty much the same. Given that a post-war poll revealed that a third of the American public believes U.S. forces actually found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and 22 percent believe Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons against U.S forces in the most recent war, it’s difficult to comprehend how Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler could conclude that the “actual war in Iraq was a modern high point in informing the public.”

Not for the first time did I come to wonder during the 2003 Iraq war how many times American journalists have to be burned (Tonkin Gulf, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Gulf War, and so on) before it occurs to them that they can’t take official Washington’s word on practically anything involving the use of American military force, whether it be the existence of weapons of mass destruction or the “rescue” of Pvt. Jessica Lynch.

Given the givens, indeed, the fuss over wartime coverage is misdirected. How much evidence do we need, Somalia not withstanding, that the natural laws of contemporary U.S. journalism seem to hold that wars or interventions of short duration involving massive military might that aren’t the subject of significant debate among elites will always get coverage any Pentagon press officer could love. Journalism simply is no match for wartime patriotism, jingoism, occasional careerism, and bottom-line corporatism. Any other conclusion is wishful thinking.

What is still worth getting worked up about is coverage before a war begins, the period before rampant nationalism slams shut the door on critical inquiry. This “establishing phase” is the time when Americans are first learning about the crisis at hand, identifying the players, assaying the options, remaining to some degree still flexible in their thinking.

On the positive side, at least serious print journalism did a noticeably better job carrying stories questioning the Bush Administration’s assertions in 2002-03 than it had in the run-up to the Gulf conflict, albeit not necessarily because of its own initiative but because such significant political elites and heavyweights from the first Bush administration as Brent Scowcroft, Lawrence Eagleburger, and General Anthony C. Zinni weighed into the debate as early as August 2002 and raised serious questions about the current President Bush’s thinking. At the same time, OpEd columnists in such weathervane newspapers as the New York Times and editorialists in general were far more critical of the administration’s arguments than they had been eleven years earlier.

Unfortunately, without denying the percolating effect of such discourse, the shift in commentary was not enough to counteract the realities that elite dissent rather quickly quieted and most people don’t read the OpEd pages or editorials. Most particularly, it could not offset the influence of nationalist cum jingoist cable television on broadcast journalism, which according to the conventional wisdom is the news source for most Americans.

The major shortcoming in pre-war coverage in my view was the mainstream press’ failure to tumble to the nature of the Bush Doctrine of preemption and pre-eminence until very late in the day. As Murrey Marder pointed out in Nieman Reports (Summer 2003), the press ”’failed to connect the dots’.” Neither the implications of the doctrine, its origins, which could be traced back to 1992, nor the impact on Bush’s thinking of such as Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, et al) received the attention they deserved until way late in the game. Instead, for far too long, mainstream journalism depicted the doctrine merely as the logical outcome of the events of September 11, 2001, a vision that had sprung full blown from the brow of George W. Bush rather than the long-held view of a tightly knit group of ideologues, now close advisors to the President, who had spoken for more than a decade of the need to impose a global Pax Americana under which the U.S. could, among other things, deal with states it deemed to be rogues without fear of international contradiction. The plan had been articulated in strikingly candid terms as early as 1992 and received subsequent endorsement and fleshing out as recently as September 2000, or a full year before September 11, 2001, by the Project for the New American Century, a group of ultra conservatives who believed the time for an American empire was way past due.

It was the terrible events of 9-11 that provided the opening to implement the long delayed “new world order” and Saddam Hussein would play a role in George W. Bush’s grand policy scheme similar to the one Willie Horton had played in his father’s election campaign.

None of the primary documents outlining this extraordinary vision were secret and students of American foreign policy knew all of the players. Yet the first significant analysis in the popular press didn’t appear until September of 2002 when Jay Bookman, deputy editorial page editor of the Atlanta Constitution, wrote a widely reprinted analysis of how the destruction of Saddam figured into the Administration’s coordinated plan to transform the US into a defacto empire. Slowly, in the wake of Bookman’s fine piece, other analysts followed suit. The problem is that the momentum for war had gained way too much steam by this point. The irony is that the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann had examined in considerable detail the same possibilities as Bookman almost a full six months before in his piece, “The Bush Administration May Have a Brand-new Doctrine of Power.” That such a major shift in American foreign policy could go so long unremarked while, say, the Laci Peterson story gets saturation coverage is a metaphor for our time.

William A. Dorman is Professor of Government at California State University, Sacramento. He teaches American foreign policy and a course in War, Peace and the Mass Media, which he began in 1970. He publishes regularly on the press and foreign policy and is co-author with Mansour Farhang of The U.S. Press and Iran: Foreign Policy and the Journalism of Deference (U.C. Press).

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